Sometimes I wish for this: traveling all around Europe and Eastern Europe and maybe even past that by myself and then blogging about it. I do want it, I think it would be really cool, and weird, and scary and also, fun to do this. But then I end up by myself for a few days and I start to rethink that plan.

I guess I can’t really compare Irving, Texas to Stockholm or some random Greek Island, but I do have to say that sometimes I get insanely, overwhelmingly lonely on the road. I can’t really say it is one place over the other, because I have spent too much time in other places (even horrible places) and not become too lonely. I travel to so many weird, sometimes desolate places for work that I just try to find the beauty there, and usually there is something – at least one thing – that I can call beautiful.

But Irving, Texas. It’s awful here. It’s been hot, it’s been muggy, and today it is raining AND hot and muggy. I am trapped in the Four Seasons wishing my guts out that I could leave right now for the airport. It’s dry here, meaning you can’t buy a bottle of wine at the store. You can’t buy a bottle of wine at the grocery store! This is the 21st century, people! What’s next, no pudding?

Thankfully I was able to scam a couple of open bottles left over from a tasting yesterday, otherwise I probably would have called the airline and paid the hundred bucks to get out of here as soon as possible.

Oh, you can get a glass of wine at the Four Seasons, but it is $10 for a glass of Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc ($7.50? I think, at The Vine) AND they tack a 17% service charge on every bill. Now, I totally would have tipped more than that anyway, but the fact that they add it and then leave a space for “additional gratuity” just galls me to no end.

Anyhow. It’s not all that bad here if you like staying in a sprawling business park type setting. Sometimes people say “oh, it’s so cool you get to travel for work.” Yeah, sometimes. But then there are those times when you are trapped in a Holiday Inn Express with no car and nothing around you and are forced to watch Jon Benet Ramsey’s “killer” fly from Long Beach to Boulder Colorado over, and over, and over.

I guess I could read. But places like this make me so brain dead that I find myself reading the same paragraph over, and over, and over like it’s the same CNN loop entrenched firmly in my brain.

It’s not what I expected, really, but there is this: I never got Texans, and they’ll never get me.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Tales from a Strange Land. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.